A Conservative Response to the Student Debt Crisis

Introducing some market discipline can benefit everyone—especially the student borrowers who most need help.

The dramatic increase in student loan debt is limiting upward mobility for young Americans and eroding popular faith in the American Dream. That’s turned college loans into a volatile issue, one progressives have seized upon by calling for more regulation and government involvement in higher education. But the real culprit is the government itself. Bad federal policy has resulted in skyrocketing tuition, deteriorating educational standards, hope-destroying student debt loads, and write-down losses for taxpayers.

The solution is market discipline, and conservatives need to start providing it.

By now the numbers are familiar. Total student loan debt has tripled since 2004 and currently amounts to $1.31 trillion, making it the largest consumer debt category in the country behind mortgage debt. Current default rates stand at 11 percent, eerily mirroring the peak of mortgage delinquency rates during the subprime crisis. And student loans carry the highest delinquency rate of any category of consumer borrowing. This should worry everyone.

The growth of student loan debt has depressed home ownership and consumption, creating an ever-growing headwind to economic growth. Missed payments ruin the credit ratings of individual borrowers and limit their capacity to assume risk—for example by starting a new business or moving to a new state.

The harms aren’t just economic. By dampening entrepreneurialism and creating a new generation of immobile, risk-averse young people, student debt actually has the capacity to change our national character. Borrowers have lost confidence in themselves and have turned instead to government for protective bailouts.

Hopelessness is festering into radicalism. Young people are furious with these restraints on their mobility, and currently that fury is being channeled by Bernie Sanders with his plan to socialize the cost of public university for all students. Instead of ceding this all-important ground to progressive activists, conservatives should be leaping over themselves to propose solutions to this catastrophe. After all, it was created by the federal government.

That federal government holds over a trillion dollars of student loan debt, and taxpayers are expected to take a net loss of $170 billion on these loans over the next decade. And the losses will only get worse. The easy availability of federal aid incentivizes universities to keep raising tuition. Taxpayers cover those costs upfront in the form of federal aid, while the universities have no skin in the game if their students default after graduating. Tuition thus goes up and up, and the dominant policy response is always to make federal aid even more available, inflating the bubble further.

These incentives ensure that student borrowers receive the worst education possible. Since universities know that taxpayers will be on the hook if their students default, they have little reason to ensure that those students receive a good education. Instead of offering a strong value proposition, they lure student customers with up-front glitz in the form of rock climbing walls, lazy rivers, and other expensive amenities. Meanwhile, educational standards are allowed to collapse. Mediocre (or worse) institutions churn out poorly prepared graduates whose skills are completely mismatched for the labor market they’re entering. They find themselves with useless degrees, working retail with tens of thousands of dollars in debt hanging over their heads.

The pot of free federal money effectively turns universities into rent-seekers. Schools seek to protect their slices of the pie instead of creating value. Spending on administration has exploded while teaching loads fall and students learn less. A more dangerous system could scarcely be imagined.

To address this, we need to examine a simple policy choice that’s kicked the problem into overdrive: government caps on interest rates for student borrowers, which artificially hold down the cost of securing a federal student loan. In private loan markets, the cost of borrowing is linked to the riskiness of the venture. But if you’re an undergraduate student borrowing from the federal government, your interest rate is pegged to the 10-year Treasury bill, currently 4.45 percent. That doesn’t change whether the borrower is a chemical engineering major at MIT or a communications major at the University of Phoenix—even though those two students represent vastly different levels of risk—because the federal government refuses to distinguish between them in its lending practices. That might sound generous, but it’s just predatory lending. The government is making it artificially cheap for vulnerable citizens to take on massive amounts of debt in pursuit of a risky asset. That taxpayers are on the hook if it all goes wrong is just icing on the cake.

The policy solution: link the cost of borrowing to the riskiness of the underlying asset. The interest rate for federal loans should rise or fall depending on the default risk of the student’s degree program (that is, the default rate of graduates who attended the same institution and majored in the same subject as the borrower). By porting private market principles into the federal loan system, we can ensure that student borrowers are incentivized to pursue degrees that maximize their chances of paying off their debt.

When the government keeps interest rates artificially low for degrees that in fact carry a high risk of default, it induces more people to sign up for risky programs. Interest rates are supposed to act as a signal that such programs are not good investments. Absent that signal, students with unsophisticated understandings of personal finance and the labor market (and hopped up on Baby Boomer platitudes about following your passion at all costs) see no reason not to go deep into the red to attend a barely accredited university and major in film studies. If students want to do this, they should feel free. If they want taxpayer help to do so, they should at least think twice.

Let’s consider the barely accredited university with the program in film studies. In a world where borrowing costs are linked to default rates, this institution would respond in one of three ways. Firstly, it could choose to compete on price by lowering tuition in an effort to attract students by counteracting the effect of higher interest rates. This benefits the student by reducing her overall debt burden. Secondly, it could choose to improve the quality of its product, making sure that programs are preparing students to succeed in the labor market. This would benefit the student by lowering her default risk. Thirdly, it could simply close the programs with the highest default rates. In some instances, entire institutions with abysmal default rates may be shuttered. This benefits the student by eliminating debt traps that the market wants abolished.

It is striking that all three outcomes are improvements over the status quo. The easy availability of federal money disincentivizes universities from lowering tuition or improving the quality of their education, while incentivizing bad universities that sell a terrible product to stay open. Under this scheme, student borrowers and taxpayers suffer together. Every incentive is misaligned. An injection of market principles is essential medicine.

To illustrate how this might work in practice, let’s consider law schools. The largest law school in the country is Thomas M. Cooley Law School. Its tuition is $50,790 per year, roughly equivalent to top law schools like Yale ($59,865), Berkeley ($52,654), and UT Austin ($50,480). And of course, the government will help you borrow at the same rate to attend Cooley as those other schools. But Cooley is not these other schools. Cooley is the worst subprime risk imaginable. Seventy-five percent of its graduates were not employed in the legal field one year after graduation. Fifty percent of its graduates weren’t employed at all. No rational lender would touch it, but the government’s drive for equity keeps it open. For the sake of its prospective students, Cooley must be made to get cheaper, get better, or close.

It’s fair to ask whether the government should be in the business of lending to students at all. But the private student loan market has had its share of dysfunction, and it’s easy to imagine unscrupulous lenders farming fees out of unsophisticated teenage borrowers. Additionally, the fact that a college degree is still a reliable income booster means that government has an incentive to offer guaranteed loans instead of allowing private banks to impose credit requirements to access education, as many young borrowers have no credit history at all. But perhaps the real answer is that voters would never accept a fully private system, and so the best that can be done is to ensure that the government causes the minimum amount of harm.

There is a downside to this proposal. Degree programs in the humanities and fine arts will likely skew wealthy, because low-income borrowers will not want to pay the relatively higher borrowing costs that such programs carry. This will strike many as unfair. But the current system is unfair, so the relevant inquiry is which creates the greater injustice. The present problem is that government policies are inducing low-income borrowers to load up on debt to get degrees that have no relationship with labor market demand. This results in an oversupply of fine arts and humanities majors. The students who are in the worst positions are those that major in these subjects at low-ranked, for-profit, and two-year schools. The question then becomes whether the government should subsidize fine arts and humanities programs at such schools with artificially cheap debt. On the one hand, we feel good about letting students pursue their passions regardless of their means or talent. On the other hand, subsidizing these pursuits may set these students up for failure.

The answer is that we should be willing to accept the cost of fewer low-income borrowers entering fine arts and humanities degree programs. It is ultimately fairer for government policy to accurately reflect risks that the borrower herself will eventually have to bear. In the subprime context, the government was guided by an ideological faith in the moral goodness of homeownership to use Fannie Mae to artificially reduce borrowing costs. While extending access to homeownership felt good, borrowers wound up being more gravely hurt when market reality inevitably intruded on the enterprise. Likewise, we should not lead vulnerable student borrowers down the road to default out of an ideological desire to maximize access to all kinds of education regardless of risk. That would be the greater injustice.

Either way, when we remember that linking borrowing costs to default rates also incentivizes schools to lower tuition and improve program quality, many prospective fine arts and humanities majors may find their opportunities improved, not constrained.

For this reform to work, it must be accompanied by strong disclosure requirements so that interest rates can have the maximal effect on borrower behavior. We don’t have good information on how student loan interest rates affect enrollment, but behavioral economics tells us that consumer decisions are impacted most by salient incentives at the moment of decision-making. For interest rates to provide an effective incentive, schools must disclose the borrowing costs of its programs upfront to prospective students. Luckily, conservatives are already out in front of the disclosure issue.

While our universities would improve under this plan, the real payoff would be in the gains to student borrowers. They would be incentivized to pursue degrees in line with labor market demand, because those programs would carry the lowest borrowing costs. This of course aids the broader economy: more schools will open programs that target areas of unmet market demand, for example, in STEM, high-skill vocational fields, and health care, creating graduates more likely to succeed while also correcting sectoral imbalances in the economy as a whole.

Student borrowers will trade the millstones around their necks for upward mobility, taxpayers will receive a return on their investment, and economic growth will quicken. Trading the government’s false pursuit of equity for market discipline benefits everyone and disentangles the distorting web that the student loan industry has become.

It costs tax money for a state to keep tuitions to state universities lower … and once taxpayers lose the Federal deduction for state and local taxes, they’re going to be even less inclined to pay more to support higher level education (not to mention primary and secondary levels).

This article is just a rehash of standard elite conservative orthodoxy.

A true conservative response to the student debt crisis would recognize “education” for what it is: a subsidy to big business.

From K-12, which is a mere subsidy to babysit, to “higher ed” which is little more than a subsidy to “advanced” fields, if not an outright arbitrary pretext to hire one person over another, “education” does not produce the advertised goals.

It is time that businesses educate their own workers, and families take care of their own children. By creating a middle man between businesses and human capital, “education” is actually inefficient. One may think it more efficient that institutions rise to take specialize in the training, but there are countless studies showing students don’t learn much in “education”.

It is a public good that citizens know how to read, do basic math, and learn some basic skills. That shouldn’t take more than a couple hours a day up until a citizen reaches 16 years of age, at the latest. Classrooms, or prison cells (whichever language you prefer), should be torn down and replaced with little cubicles that students can get a couple hours of instruction and research in. Instead, “education” is merely a social talk shop for immature kids, and a place for overpriced babysitters called teachers.

This piece is woefully misinformed. The author has failed to recognize/inculcate key facts that fatally pervert his analysis and conclusions. In fact, this piece actually serves to feed the worst sort of big-government that this country has yet seen. There is nothing conservative about it. Just the opposite, in fact. There is much to criticize here, but I will cover only the first order flaws:

1. In the absence of bankruptcy protections, statutes of limitations, and other core consumer protections (that exist for every other type of loan in this country), the government actually makes a profit, not a loss, on defaulted student loans. This was first reported by John Hechinger in 2004, but it is still true today, and a simple glance at years worth of White House Budget data confirm this.

2. The Government makes a tremendous profit on student loans. In 2012, the government booked profits of $50 Billion on the lending system. This was when the cumulative debt was just shy of $1 Trillion. Today, this principal has grown significantly. It is likely that government profits have similarly grown.

The author needs to inculcate these facts. If he did, he would quickly come to agree that raising interest rates is not conservative, but would only feed this predatory, big-government lending system even more than it is already engorging itself on the citizenry.

The true conservative solution to this problem begins by repealing 11 USC 523(a)(8), and returning standard bankruptcy protections to the debt. The Office of Federal Student Aid (which was set up and is not run, by and large, by conservative bankers from industry) will certainly respond by reducing lending limits significantly, kicking the horrible schools out of the program (this has long been badly needed), and likely limiting the types of majors it will lend for (possibly). I would also expect that the Department of Education would begin cracking the whip on the schools to contain their costs, reduce their time to graduate (this has grown significantly over the past couple of decades), and improve tha quality of their education.

This will reduce prices, improve quality, reduce lending, reduce defaults, and generally bring much needed market rationality to the system.

There is legislation in Congress right now that would achieve this. HR. 2366. I encourage everyone reading this to push this legislation.

The Cato Institute agrees with this. Jeb Bush included bankruptcy return in his presidential agenda. Conservative David Brooks has echoed this sentiment.

This is the conservative solution. The author’s solution is not conservative. It is the opposite, if not borderline tyrannical.

This is all such nonsense. The writer has essentially created a straw man. What about the well accredited college where a student takes a reasonable major (environmental sciences) but ends up with an MS and $100,000 in debt? The improvements suggested here will simply deprive the student of an education . Why not instead fund most of it.